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Ever since ChatGPT became the thing every marketer wanted to talk about, I’ve been giving small business owners the same unglamorous advice:
Get your SEO basics in place before you go looking for an AI visibility hack.
Saying that has felt a little lonely. GEO is the shiny new thing, and “not yet” is a hard sell when everyone else seems to be sprinting toward it.
Then, this October, three new analyses came out that back it up.
Marie Haynes found that AI tools sent less than 1% of the traffic Google did. The SEO Works found that a small lift in organic search brings in more conversions than doubling your AI traffic. And Kevin Indig went looking for AI’s hidden influence on Direct traffic and couldn’t find it.
Different datasets, same conclusion: Google is still where the clients come from.
I had my own numbers to add, from a corner of the web those studies don’t focus on: 16 small-business websites, most of them service providers, tracked over a full year.
Google Still Sends 97 Out of Every 100 Search Visits to the Small Businesses I Track
Across the 16 small-business websites I track, Google sent 97 out of every 100 visits that came from either Google or an AI tool over the past year.
Put another way: for every visit that came from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI tools combined, Google’s search results sent about 30.
That held up across the board, not only on average. On the typical site, AI tools sent about 2% of search visits. Even the site where AI did best still got 88% of its search visits from Google.
None of this means these businesses are failing at AI search.
It reflects where people are searching, and which platforms are actually sending them to websites. Ultimately, whether someone is looking for a pelvic floor PT, a copywriter, or a personal trainer, they’re still far more likely to type that into Google than ask ChatGPT.
And my sites weren’t an outlier. The bigger studies found the same thing.
The Bigger Studies Landed in the Same Place
The larger studies published this month found the same pattern: Google sent far more visits than AI. They also asked the obvious follow-up. Are those few AI visitors worth more?
Sometimes they convert a little better, but not by enough to make up for how few of them there are.
- Marie Haynes, 100 websites. In her year of Google Analytics data, ChatGPT visitors converted about 4.5 times better than visitors from Google on the 55 sites that tracked conversions. But there were so few of them that Google still drove 27 times more conversions than every AI tool combined.
- The SEO Works, 95 websites. In their 12-month benchmark, organic search sent 39 times more traffic than AI assistants. AI visitors converted about 18% better overall, but worse than organic on 23 of the 63 sites they could compare. By their math, a 5% lift in organic search adds about 10 conversions a month per site. Doubling AI traffic adds about 7.
My sites ran marginally higher on AI. Across the 16 small-business websites, AI tools sent about 3.3% of search visits. In Marie’s dataset that number was 0.7%, and in The SEO Works’ it was 2.5%.
That’s likely not a meaningful break from the general trend. Whichever dataset you look at, Google sent at least 30 visits for every one from AI.
AI Hasn’t Picked Up the Clicks Google Stopped Sending
From October through December 2025, Google sent 24,881 visits to the 15 sites I have a full year of data for. From July through September 2026, it sent 20,803, about 16% fewer.
If people were moving their searches from Google to ChatGPT, AI visits should have climbed as Google’s fell. They didn’t. AI’s share of search visits sat between 2% and 3% last fall, peaked at 4.8% in March, and settled back into that range over the summer.
So where did those Google clicks go? Some of them probably never left Google. When Google shows an AI Overview, people click through to a website about half as often.
Two things could soften this picture:
- Seasonality. I’m comparing fall with the following summer, and some businesses slow down in summer. A year-over-year comparison would show how much of the drop is seasonal, and I haven’t run one yet.
- The SEO Works saw AI edge up. In their data, AI’s share of organic traffic rose after May 2026, from about 2.3% to 3.0%. They call that provisional because it covers only four months.
Neither changes the bigger point. Over a full year, AI stayed a sliver of search traffic while Google’s clicks shrank.
That leaves the most common pushback: AI can influence people who never click at all.
What About the AI Influence You Can’t Measure?
Some of AI’s influence on your business is real, and you won’t see it in your analytics as a click.
Someone can ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, see your name, and look you up later.
Some AI clicks also arrive without a label saying where they came from, so analytics tools can’t count them as AI. That means the AI numbers in this post are a floor. The real number is somewhat higher.
Where AI's Hidden Influence Would Show Up
There’s a popular theory that this so-called “hidden influence” shows up later in two places. One is branded searches, when someone Googles your business by name. The other is Direct traffic: visits your analytics can’t trace to a source, like someone typing your web address straight into their browser.
If AI tools are sending people your way without a click, direct traffic numbers should be climbing.
Two Studies, Two Different Answers
Two recent analyses went looking for that climb.
Kevin Indig checked 12 Google Analytics accounts and couldn’t reliably find it. He found that Direct traffic rose sharply between January and September 2026, but much of that rise was bot traffic. Counting only engaged visits, Direct was flat. And in a separate test of four brands, none of the early links he found between AI visibility and later traffic held up.
Similarweb did find signs of that hidden influence. When ChatGPT named a brand, people were more likely to visit that brand’s site within a week, and most of them got there through a Google search or by typing in the address.
The two analyses don’t fully line up, but they were also performed in very different ways. Kevin worked from website analytics. Similarweb tracked people’s browsing behavior over time.
So AI’s influence is probably real, but no one can tell a small business yet how much it’s worth.
How to Tell Whether AI Is Helping Your Business
If you want to know whether AI is helping your business, Kevin suggests looking beyond your analytics.
Check whether your business shows up when you ask AI tools the questions your clients ask. Ask new clients how they found you. Then see whether those answers line up with real growth in inquiries.
And none of this is a reason to neglect Google. It sends you nearly all of the search visitors you can see, and in Similarweb’s data, it’s where a lot of AI’s unseen influence lands, too. You also don’t have to choose between the two, because the same work feeds both.
The Same Work Gets You Found in Both Places
The work that earns you Google traffic is the same work that makes you worth recommending in an AI answer.
Google and the AI tools are trying to answer the same question for the person searching: who does this, and can I trust them? A website that answers that clearly for a person answers it for both.
The SEO Works saw a hint of this in their data. Sites that gained AI referrals over the year also tended to gain organic traffic. That’s a correlation, and it doesn’t prove one causes the other. But it’s what you’d expect to see if the same underlying work is driving both.
So before you spend your limited marketing time exclusively going after ChatGPT mentions, look at your website and ask 3 questions:
- Can someone find the service you sell? A visitor should be able to tell quickly what you offer, who it’s for, and where to go next. That starts with a dedicated page for each service.
- Does the page answer what they need to know before hiring you? Your process, who you’re a good fit for, what working with you looks like, and how to get started.
- Have you shown enough of your work to give them a reason to choose you? Examples, testimonials, and your own point of view are what set you apart from the next name on the list.
That work builds your discoverability across every search platform. It also serves the people already landing on your website, and right now most of them are coming from Google.
Prepare for Where Search Is Going. Take Care of What’s Paying You Now.
AI search is real, and it’s worth preparing for. But right now, Google is the hand that feeds you.
So spend your time where clients are already finding you, on the three questions above. That work pays off on Google today, and it’s the same work that makes you worth recommending as AI search develops.
Want to keep up with all the changes in search?
AI search will keep evolving, and so will the data. I keep track of everything worth paying attention to The Search Party, my newsletter for service providers who want to make the most their limited marketing time.
